defocus material?

[Mark Suszko]

For a news set with blurred action behind it, I think I would try plexiglass panels and just hit the back sides with dulling spray to taste, or frost them. When i make this kind of news set in the studio, I just chromakey the entire background in and use frosted “glass” panels made in photoshop on a separate layer of the composite, you have perfect cotnrol of everything then.

But if you want to use the special cloths, try the online catalog from Rosebrand in New York as a source, thye always seemed to have whatever I wanted in the widest seamless size.

[Todd Terry]

I believe it’s the current NBC Nightly News set that does just that… has an ever-so-slightly frosted panel behind the anchor to blur out the newsroom set behind him. If it’s not Brian Williams’ current set, it’s someone else’s… or the last one. At any rate, it looks good.

I’ve tried frosting glass myself just with matte spray. It was impossible to get it even and not see the spray streaks. If I was going to do it again I would either get more professional spraying equipment, or just use real glass and very lightly sandblast it.

One television station that we frequently work for (shooting their higher-end promos that they don’t do in house) has a similar frosted glass on set in front of a monitor bank. It works well, but theirs is very soft.

Seems to work well if the difussion material is very close to the background…an inch or two or three. Farther than that and it’s just a blurry blob, unless your frosting is very light indeed.

I don’t know your setup, maybe it’s a live (moving people) background that you are trying to soften. On news sets that I’ve worked on before though, often there would be a big photograph (usually a cityscape or skyline) that was a background back-lit Duratrans. In a couple of those instances we simply had the Duratrans printed a little out of focus to soften it and enhance the apparent depth. It took a while to get it through to the Duratrans printing company though that we wanted it out of focus. They didn’t quite get it at first.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Jeremy Rowell]

Ya, I’m trying to soften the people working in the background. Also the background is cluttered and too busy. Trying to do it on the cheap, as money is TIGHT in the tv business right now.

Glass or plexi might be my best be. People will also be walking right behind it, which would probably disturb any type of plastic or material… ruining the illusion.

[Steve Wargo]

It was a 12 foot wide, 100 foot long painters drop cloth on a roll. This was a single layer. I thought it was a bit too soft but they loved it. the client always wins.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .